What to do with fuel-burning cars -- convert them?
What to do with fuel-burning cars -- convert them?
The avg. age of a car bought in Africa at the time of purchase is 21 years old. All these people buying EVs think they are taking a gas-burner off the road. But in fact cars do not get thrown away. They get shipped to Africa where they live on and continue to emit GHG for decades longer.
So what’s the answer? Destroying the car is a non-starter, as no one would throw away value. It would be like asking people to set some of their cash on fire.
Why not remove the engine and repurpose it as a backup power generator for power outtages? Then convert the rest of the car into an EV.
Conversions are being done. There are some companies offering to do the work. But these are very small scale operations that are rarely spoken of. I have to wonder why (what seems like) the best solution is being overlooked.
One thing to consider is that a newly imported old car to Africa is probably replacing an even older car with worse efficiency and emissions. Given how spotty electrical service is in those places and that almost half of the continent doesn't even have electric service to the home, EVs are probably not any kind of solution yet for most.
Well, a car ICE car converted to an EV will typically not be as good a vehicle as one built as an EV in the first place. But the real issue is the same one behind not seeing small cheap EVs in the US, lower profit margins.
Part is lower profit margins. Part is total cost of ownership. Part is recharging them. If I don't have a charging station at my place of residence, I have to drive somewhere find an open charging station and spend time waiting for it to charge. There are fast charging stations but they cost more (total cost of ownership) and they still aren't as fast as filling a gas tank (time is money). Depending on where the charging station is, I might be stuck there just waiting for it recharge.
What do you mean by “good”? I see a constant stream of articles about EVs being enshitified with cloud-attached surveillance tech and vulnerable to unwelcome remote hacking. To privacy advocates and tech rights proponents this means the ones designed as EVs are worse.
If you mean efficient, I’d be tempted to say the difference would be negligible in the big scheme of things. Factory produced EVs are not only surveillance systems on wheels, they are more hackable by threat agents than they are by their owners. Whereas a converted EV is likely more conducive to a /right to repair/.
The best scenario I could envision is this:
You bring your car to shop of expert converters. You watch over their shoulder as they convert it. This serves as training to know your own car. And as well to know how the power generator is built. You drive away with an open source EV that you can fix yourself, pulling behind it a trailor with a power generator, which is then connected to the charging inlet of the EV.
Okay, that last sentence was a joke, to be clear.. Some Teslas have been spotted pulling a power generator on a trailer which then plugged into the car. I hope that practice of towing a generator is not actually a serious trend.
I was talking about efficiency and range, which typically falls pretty short of cars intended to be EVs. But there are also other changes like wheels being closer to the front ends of the vehicles and not needing the transmission hump in the floor, giving more passenger and cargo space.
All new cars are terrible for privacy, EV or not. Small shops doing conversions on older cars will absolutely be better in that regard. But as soon as you make it a mass market thing, the same incentives to invade the privacy of their consumers will end up with the same result. Better privacy and data protection laws are the only way to stop that, I think.
Destroying the car (or at least the engine) isn't entirely out of the question, as that has successfully happened when incentives are given, such as with the cash for clunkers program. But I can't imagine that would be a better option emissions-wise compared to EV conversions.
Perhaps subsidizing EV conversions could be a viable route. A significant tax break and perhaps government loans for newly formed conversion companies could really ramp up scale of conversions, and hopefully lower costs.
Ideally, even larger tax breaks could be offered to worker coop conversion shops to encourage that form of business.
Since these won't perform as well as a purpose built EV, as another user mentioned, owners will likely want larger batteries to compensate. If done at scale with lithium based batteries, that would be both costly, and worse, terrible for the environment due to the requirements for lithium.
Sodium ion batteries are just about production ready, and would be the environmental material of choice if this were to be done, even if their range would be lowered due to the decreased energy density.
Cash for clunkers was worthless handout to the auto industry. We traded in cars that were perfectly serviceable to sell SUVs with no effiency standards. It wasnt progress but a keysian blowjob to billionaires.
I'm not the biggest fan of it either, I only mentioned it as an example that some people will willingly destroy their own cars for a small incentive. I recall it shrunk the used car market noticeably, which had the effect of raising the price of transportation for people who couldn't afford new cars.
Had it been crafted with lower emissions as the end goal instead of economic stimulus, such as the credit only applying to only the most fuel efficient vehicles from each brand, it could've had a larger positive effect. It wasn't a complete waste, though. Taking the most fuel inefficient vehicles off the road, even when replaced with a modest improvement, can have a profound difference, since MPG is a not linear decrease in gas usage.
The alternative bill described in the wikipedia article that some democrats proposed would've done more good, especially as it would've given $1,000 toward purchasing a more fuel efficient used car as well.
There's conversion to EV, conversion to run on woodgas or possibly conversion to an alcohol engine - I think it depends on what's readily available locally in parts and energy sources. If you have a sawmill or work construction or deconstruction and can be burning wood scraps for fuel that already exist, gasification might make sense. If you live in a place with lots of sugarcane or another source of alcohol, that might work. Ideally your energy source is a waste product of something that's already there, and your use doesn't incentivize more deforestation etc (that's the hard part).
I also started a list of car parts that can be used/repurposed for other tasks, mostly based on stuff I'd seen on permaculture and tool forums: https://jacobcoffinwrites.wordpress.com/2024/09/04/using-every-part-of-the-car-a-resource-for-solarpunk-writers-and-artists/ it's intended more for writers/artists, but some of the links might be interesting.
You have heard the thing that Ethiopia is banning import of all ICEs? https://electrek.co/2024/02/02/it-begins-ethiopia-set-to-become-first-country-to-ban-internal-combustion-cars/
That’s interesting.. I thought a Scandinavian country was known for banning ICE cars. Though apparently Ethiopia is getting credit for the first to enact the policy.
Though in principle it would make sense to have an exception so that someone in Ethiopia could to do ICE→EV conversions if they wanted.